Personal Training in QLD

Personal Training in New Zealand

How To Keep Your Clients Interested*

Thursday, 2 July 2015, By Elliott Caras

Here are two sure-fire ways to ensure you are interesting and
providing great customer service to your clients.

Are you scale-able?

What does this mean exactly, being able to scale means you can
continue to grow and meet clients changing needs all while keeping
the client motivated, inspired and subsequently engaged in your
service.

Have you noticed that your clients will never ask you "what's
old?" That's because they are not interested in what's old! Your
job as a coach and a leader is to keep coming up with interesting
and exciting answers to the question "what's new?

Understanding this important lesson on keeping your clients
interested will mean being disciplined in many facets, with
personal development being one of the most important aspects of
having a successful coaching career. You can only take someone as
high as you are.

One of my high profile clients gauges a lot of his staff on
their ability to teach him something. He is constantly asking the
question what can I learn from this person? We have all had those
relationships where it feels like a one-way street of information
and knowledge sharing, getting minimal in return. How good to you
feel about those people and how much time, do you want to commit to
a non-reciprocal relationship of little benefit to you?

This is compounded when you have a paying client expecting to
get a result, through the education, inspiration and guidance that
you are providing. The client you want to train the most will be a
person who values their time, and these people will be asking the
questions:

What am I learning from you the trainer?

What are the training/coaching sessions teaching me about
myself?

To grow personally will aid in your ability to keep your clients
interested, the question is what is your plan for growth this year?
I committed myself to reading a book a month in order to grow
exponentially as a person. Start off smaller and build up, your
career depends on differentiating yourself from the rest, and the
best way I know how to do this, is through personal development and
implementing and sharing the learning from each book.

Consistent service.

This is huge! We are in the service industry. Your ability to
keep clients interested and paying your session fees has everything
to do with how you treat them. My 10 years career as a personal
trainer and business owner has shown me that service standards and
consistency of service is a big contributor in how to keep clients
interested.

To be effective with clients you have to understand their
specific needs in detail, formulate a plan to help them achieve
their goals and implement that plan with a consistent and
methodological approach, providing accountability and tracking
along the way Vision Personal Training provides the system in which
to do so effectively.

What sets a good trainer apart from an average one is they don't
over promise and under deliver. Gun personal trainers and coaches
know how to focus on the 20% that gets their clients 80% of their
results and delivers that every single time. Promise that 20% and
deliver it 100% of the time, the rest is just cream.

Don't set yourself up for failure by offering over the top
service, or too much variety to your clients in the initial stages
of the relationship, they will come to expect it and inevitably you
wont be able to maintain consistent service by over extending
yourself to your client, especially in after session support.

Don't just give them a weekly goal for the first month and then
have that discipline fall by the wayside at Vision Personal
Training we provide weekly accountability and goal setting. Don't
text message your clients everyday for the first 7 days only to
offer minimal support thereafter. Have a plan that you can
stick to, and that the client responds to given their personal
needs and deliver that every time.

I liken a great PT session experience to be like a master barber
haircut. It all about the experience from the very first
appointment and long term loyalty to that barber depends on the
consistency of the service being delivered to me each time.
Consistency in the person providing the haircut saves me explaining
my needs every 3 weeks. Consistent high service standards -
punctuality to appointment, hair wash and scalp massage, a cut that
I'm happy with, and great rapport to enable good conversation about
interests we share in common.

Most customer service experiences can be related to and used in
our personal training businesses and customer dealings.

Become a student of great customer service, model people who do
it exceptionally well and apply your learning to your own PT
business and clients consistently.

These two tips alone, followed with discipline will keep your
clients interested and on track to achieving all their health and
fitness goals.